The Life of a Mercenary

[ZaphodBeeblebrox]

A mercenary is a person who takes part in an armed conflict who is not a national or
party to the conflict and is "motivated to take part in the hostilities by desire for private gain."

Mercenary, hired professional soldier who fights for any state or nation without regard to
political interests or issues. From the earliest days of organized warfare until the development
of political standing armies in the mid-17th century, governments frequently supplemented their
military forces with mercenaries.

Mercenaries were often seen as problematic, given their willingness to fight for the highest bidder.
Frequently changing sides during conflict, depending on who was paying the most.

So how would the role of mercenary work out in X4?

Lets say you join in combat fighting for one faction for a sum of credits.
How will this effect your standing and reputation with the opposing faction?

Typically at the end of a campaign, mercenary troops would hire out
to the highest bidder, so quite possibly fighting on a different side in an
extended conflict.

Would this kind of behaviour be available in X4?

[Crimsonraziel]

If your question is, wether something like this is implemented, I'm pretty sure the answer is 'no'.

Maybe as part of some designed plot. But for generic missions and the rest of the game I expect it to be like all its predecessors.
They could add generic missions that include a chance to switch sides for an obolus. (For me this would feel more like corruption than being a mercenary.)
Other than that, the player is his own faction and everything he does will affect his reputation with factions. Constantly switching sides between opponents will most likely end up in offending both.

This is only an assumption based on previous X-games, but so far there is nothing (that I know of) that indicates they changed that system.

[RAVEN.myst]

I've actually seen a rudimentary version of this in games before, though not necessarily X games, implemented as follows: if a player is on a mission, then casualties inflicted on the target faction didn't cause reputation loss - only "independent" actions against factions caused deterioration of relationships. Personally, whenever I encountered this paradigm I didn't much like it - it seemed a bit implausible to me, even though in the framework of mercenaries as a matter of course it does actually make sense (up to a point, anyway.)

What those games never did, however, was really simulate the distrust of mercenaries - the way that could be implemented, perhaps, is to (under the relevant circumstances) disallow reputation loss below a certain level, but allow it above neutrality, and reduce the increase of reputation above neutrality; thus, it would be possible to ear a degree of trust by siding consistently with a faction, but that special status would quickly be lost upon turning coat, "resetting" back to neutral.

[ZaphodBeeblebrox]

This might tie into the idea of flying ships provided by a faction.

So you take a mission and the faction supply you with a ship to do the job in.

That ship has a "transponder" that provides an identity.

So while doing the mission you are temporarily identified as a different faction.

Thus not incurring a reputation loss.